Poets

Lars Gustafsson

1936–2016

Lars Gustafsson was born in Västerås, Sweden, on May 17, 1936. He studied at Uppsala University, where he earned a licentiate degree in philosophy in 1960 and a doctorate in theoretical philosophy in 1978. His writing career began in 1959 with the publication of his first novel, and the following year, he published his first poetry collection, Ballongfararna (Norstedt, 1962). Also in 1960, he began working for Bonniers Litterära Magasin, a prestigious Swedish journal, serving as the associate editor until 1965 and then as the editor-in-chief until 1972.

One of Sweden’s most frequently translated contemporary poets, Gustafsson was the author of several volumes of poetry published in the United States, including A Time in Xanadu (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Elegies and Other Poems (New Directions, 2000), and The Stillness of the World Before Bach (New Directions, 1988).

Gustafsson’s poetry is known for its philosophical questioning and clarity of observation; he has at times been called a “mathematical lyricist.” He wrote of his career, “I do not know what is most important to me: my literary work…or my philosophical work. Sometimes I cannot see any sharp boundary between these fields and I tend to regard myself as a philosopher who has turned literature into one of his tools.”

About his poetry, Jane Hirshfield writes: “Lars Gustafsson’s poems hold airplanes and silver mines, dogs travelling into the far north, a small crayfish escaped from his son’s aquarium and found years later pressed between two pages of a shelved edition of Aristotle. They name pieces of classical music, philosophers, medieval Arabic scholars, historical explorers, stone walls, aspen trees, fishes....His poems, at least as they appear in English translation, do not make a fuss about their own poeticness. Instead, they present the voice of a person pondering the inner and outer realms of human existence as seemingly freely as a visitor might wander the stalls of a souk. You read him never knowing if you will next see an array of sandals or of spices, a stream or a library. His books become an anthology of perceptions and experiences that quietly, tactfully, enlarge the world of the possible. The ordinary object and mundane circumstance arrive at the metaphysical as mysteriously as that small, lost crayfish once entered the pages of Aristotle. I’ve learned from Gustafsson’s poems all my working life as a poet; I’ve been moved, startled, and accompanied by them as a human being for thirty-five years.”

In the early 1980s, Gustafsson moved to Austin, Texas, where he served as a professor of philosophy and creative writing at the University of Texas until his retirement in 2006. He received many literary awards, including the Bellman Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Heinrich Steffens Preise, and the Prix International Charles Veillon des Essais. He also published several works of prose, including the novel The Death of a Beekeeper (W. W. Norton, 1981). In 2016, his Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books. He died on April 2, 2016.

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By This Poet

Here there may be, in the midst of summer,a few days when suddenly it’s fall.Thrushes sing on a sharper note.The rocks stand determined out in the water.They know something. They’ve always known it.We know it too, and we don’t like it.On the way home, in the boat, on just such eveningsyou would stand stock-still in the bow, collected,scouting the scents coming across the water.You read the evening, the faint streak of smokefrom a garden, a pancake fryinghalf a mile away, a badgerstanding somewhere in the same twilightsniffing the same way. Our friendshipwas of course a compromise; we livedtogether in two different worlds: mine,mostly letters, a text passing through life,yours, mostly smells. You had knowledgeI would have given much to have possessed:the ability to let a feeling—eagerness, hate, or love—run like a wave throughout your bodyfrom nose to tip of tail, the inabilityever to accept the moon as fact.At the full moon you always complained loudly against it.You were a better Gnostic than I am. And consequentlyyou lived continually in paradise.You had a habit of catching butterflies on the leap,and munching them, which some people thought disgusting.I always liked it. Whycouldn’t I learn from you? And doors.In front of closed doors you lay down and sleptsure that sooner or later the one would comewho’d open up the door. You were right.I was wrong. Now I ask myself, now thislong mute friendship is forever finished,if possibly there was anything I could dowhich impressed you. Your firm convictionthat I called up the thunderstormsdoesn’t count. That was a mistake. I thinkmy certain faith that the ball existed,even when hidden behind the couch,somehow gave you an inkling of my world.In my world most things were hiddenbehind something else. I called you “dog,”I really wonder whether you perceived meas a larger, noisier “dog”or as something different, forever unknown,which is what it is, existing in that attributeit exists in, a whistlethrough the nocturnal park one has got used toreturning to without actually knowingwhat it is one is returning to. About you,and who you were, I knew no more.One might say, from this more objectivestandpoint, we were two organisms. Twoof those places where the universe makes a knotin itself, short-lived, complex structuresof proteins that have to complicate themselvesmore and more in order to survive, until everythingbreaks and turns simple once again, the knotdissolved, the riddle gone. You were a questionasked of another question, nothing more,and neither had the answer to the other.